Man of ideas -- and words

BOOKS - new nonfiction

Lincoln's steadfast grasp of written communication changed how we think of our nation.

January 7, 2007|By Reviewed By Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

In a eulogy of his idol Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln noted that Clay's eloquence "did not consist, as many fine specimens of eloquence" do, of an "elegant arrangement of words and sentences; but rather of that deeply earnest and impassioned tone, and manner, which can proceed only from great sincerity and a thorough conviction, in the speaker of the justice and importance of his cause." This, he concluded, is what enabled Clay truly to touch "the chords of human sympathy."

The same, of course, might be said of Lincoln himself: arguably the finest writer to ever hold the office of president, and one who used his eloquence -- most notably in the Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses -- profoundly to transform how Americans thought about their country and its ideals.

In Lincoln's Sword, Douglas L. Wilson -- co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., and the author of Honor's Voice, a critically acclaimed study of the younger Lincoln -- looks at the role that writing played in Lincoln's presidency, focusing on the circumstances that shaped particular documents and the evolution of those documents through the president's meticulous process of revision.

Reams of words have already been devoted to Lincoln's writing, and while Lincoln's Sword provides some glittering nuggets of insight, much of it retraces familiar ground. The most engaging portions of this book deal with Lincoln's habits of composition and the central place that writing played in his life. Wilson suggests that for the president writing was a form of refuge, "a place of intellectual retreat from the chaos and confusion of office where he could sort through conflicting options and order his thoughts with words."

He notes that Lincoln often scribbled down ideas on scraps of paper and that he was a skilled reviser of his own work. He observes that Lincoln's fondness for reading aloud honed his sensitivity to phrasing and cadence and rhythm, and that he had a penchant for dramatic images and the literary device of antithesis.

Finally he argues that Lincoln -- a man of many moods, from the melancholic to the playful, from the philosophical to the irreverent -- was a writer of enormous range: someone equally gifted at the comic and the elegiac, the vernacular and the magisterial. Curiously, Wilson does not spend much time delving into the influence that Lincoln's favorite writings -- including Shakespeare's plays and the Bible -- had on his own work.

"The truth is that Lincoln's writing, while frequently given credit for its clarity, did not rate high by the prevailing standards of eloquence, which, like the architecture of the day, valued artifice and ornament," Wilson writes. "Like his contemporaries Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson, Lincoln was effectively forging a new, distinctively American instrument."

Like many Lincoln biographers, Wilson emphasizes his capacity for growth and the transformation of this folksy politician from Illinois into the Savior of the Union. He points out that Lincoln's ascension to the White House was greeted with skepticism -- many regarded him as a callow, unpolished politician, ill-prepared to grapple with a nation that was "in imminent danger of dissolution" -- and that those who knew that Lincoln insisted on doing his own writing "were not favorably impressed."

With the publication (in newspapers and pamphlets) of a series of public letters by Lincoln, however, things began to change. Lincoln himself "eventually came to realize how effective he could be before the public in a literary medium," Wilson writes, and "it seems certain that he began to see how it might play a larger role" in shaping public opinion: "By the time he came to write the Gettysburg Address, for example, he was attempting to help put the horrific carnage of the Civil War in a positive light, and at the same time to do it in a way that would have constructive implications for the future."

With that succinct address, Lincoln would forge what Wilson calls "a galvanizing and durable expression" of the war's purpose, ingraining in the nation's consciousness a new understanding of the affirmation of equality contained in the Declaration of Independence, just as with the Second Inaugural Address, delivered shortly before his assassination, he would produce a magnanimous sermon on the meaning of that destructive and bloody conflict and the road toward binding up the nation's wounds.